Anti-Islam Saudi immigrant detained for Magdeburg attack

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The man who allegedly drove into a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday night, killing four people, is a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who arrived in Germany in 2006. , according to authorities. .

Reiner Haseloff, prime minister of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, said the alleged perpetrator, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, was not known to police as an Islamist.

Al-Abdulmohsen’s profile on the social media site X indicates that he is a fierce critic of Islam.

German media reported that he is an activist who helped opponents of the regime in Saudi Arabia flee the country and seek asylum in Europe.

Abdulmohsen allegedly drove his black BMW

A video spread on social media showed officers surrounding him at a tram stop. He was seen lying on the ground next to his vehicle, a rented car with a Munich license plate, and was later taken away for questioning.

Authorities in Saxony-Anhalt said four people were killed in the attack and more than 200 were injured, 41 of them seriously. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the site of the attack on Saturday.

“This is a catastrophe for the city of Magdeburg and for the region and for Germany in general,” Haseloff said.

Since the incident, several interviews with the alleged perpetrator have resurfaced, including one in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2019 in which he described himself as “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.”

He has also expressed admiration for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right anti-immigration party that is in second place behind the center-right CDU/CSU bloc ahead of Germany’s national elections in February, and accused Germany of failing to do the same. enough. to fight against Islamism.

“After 25 years in this business, you think nothing could surprise you anymore,” Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert at King’s College London, wrote in X. “But a 50-year-old former Saudi Muslim living in East Germany loves AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance towards Islamists; that wasn’t really on my radar.”

The incident comes almost eight years to the day 12 people were killed and 49 injured in 2016 on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz when an Islamic State terrorist crashed a truck into a Christmas market.

Much remains unclear about al-Abdulmohsen and his possible motivation.

According to German media reports, the alleged attacker was born in the Saudi city of Hofuf and arrived in Germany in March 2006 to study. In July 2016 he was granted refugee status after claiming he had received death threats for turning away from Islam.

Authorities said he worked as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Bernburg, a city of 32,000 between Halle and Magdeburg.

Spiegel Online reported that he was an activist who helped people (particularly women) flee Saudi Arabia and that he ran an Internet site that provided information about the German asylum system. In 2019 he gave interviews about his activities to two German newspapers in which he expressed his hatred of Islam.

In one, he said he had “broke” from religion in 1997.

“I found life in Saudi Arabia to be a tough test, you have to pretend to be Muslim and follow all the rituals,” he said. “I knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realized that even anonymous activism would endanger my life as a former Saudi Muslim, I applied for asylum.”

In the other, he said he had written posts criticizing Islam on an internet forum run by jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received death threats.

“They wanted to ‘kill’ me if I ever returned to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It wouldn’t have made any sense to expose myself to the risk of having to return and then be killed.”

In recent months, he appeared to have moved away from activism and adopted a highly critical attitude towards the German authorities that fed into conspiracy theories more often associated with the nationalist right.

In a post on X in November laying out the “demands of the Saudi liberal opposition,” he called on Germany to “protect its borders against illegal immigration.”

“It has become clear that Germany’s open borders policy was (former Chancellor Angela) Merkel’s plan to Islamize Europe,” he wrote. He also demanded that Germany repeal sections of its penal code that he said “limit. . . freedom of expression” by “making it a crime (sic) to insult or disparage religious doctrines or practices.”

Its profile

Earlier this month he was interviewed by an anti-Islam blog and accused German authorities of carrying out a covert operation to persecute former Saudi Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadists.